For years, Haitians who toiled in the rural fields of the
Dominican Republic have endured police beatings, arbitrary
expulsion from the country as well as a lack of health care,
most schooling and the right to vote.

But now a Boalt Hall lecturer and students from her
International Human Rights Law Clinic are hoping their
efforts will help end such abuses.

Lecturer Laurel Fletcher led four students to the
Caribbean country last spring to document the abuses. Their
findings were presented to the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights, an organ of the Washington DC-based
Organization of American States, on Oct. 7.

Fletcher hopes the effort will spotlight the issue and
pressure Dominican Republic leaders to reform. It is just
one of several projects launched by the law school's Human
Rights Law Clinic, which opened in January 1998 with
Fletcher as staff attorney. Boalt Lecturer Carolyn Patty
Blum directs the clinic.

"The skills that we give these students are going to
serve them well regardless of what they do," said Fletcher.
"Students here learn how to think about complex problems and
how to solve complex problems."

Fletcher is no stranger to such work. The Harvard Law
School graduate performed pro bono human rights work in
Yugoslavia, South Africa and Beijing. Before coming to Boalt
in January, she represented plaintiffs in class-action,
employment discrimination lawsuits.

At Boalt, she said, "I saw my role as providing the
opportunity for students to really dig in and figure out how
they could help solve a problem."

In March, about two months after the clinic opened,
Fletcher 's group visited the island of Hispaniola, site of
the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Elise Brown, of the East
Bay Community Law Center, also served as a supervising
attorney during the trip.

In the Dominican Republic, many individuals of Haitian
descent work 12-hour days in the sugar cane fields, chopping
cane with machetes, sometimes slitting their arms and legs
in the process. Often, says Fletcher, the workers are not
paid for months. They subsist on beans and rice, huddle in
shacks covered by corrugated tin roofs, and live in fear
that police will bus them back to Haiti.

Field workers told the Boalt group about individuals
plucked from their communities with no opportunity to show
they were in the country legally and no opportunity to tell
family members of their fate.

They looked to the law students for a voice.

The clinic plans to continue working with Dominican
Republic-based human rights organizations to assist them in
documenting abuses and, when appropriate, filing legal
action alleging international human rights law abuses.

Says Fletcher, "We have a moral responsibility to assist
them in the long-term battle and not just provide a Band-Aid
solution."